Dahlia Lithwick has a devastating takedown of the Congressional cretins who stepped into the Terri Schiavo case :

This morning’s decision by Congress and President Bush?to authorize new federal legislation that will obliterate years of state court litigation, and justify re-inserting a feeding tube into Terri Schiavo, based on new and illusory federal constitutional claims?is not about law. It is congressional activism, plain and simple; legislative overreaching and hubris taken to absurd extremes.

Let’s be clear: The piece of legislation passed late last night, the so-called “Palm Sunday Compromise,” has nothing whatever to do with the rule of law. The rule of law in this country holds that this is a federalist system?in which private domestic matters are litigated in state, not federal courts. The rule of law has long provided that such domestic decisions are generally made by competent spouses, as opposed to parents, elected officials, popular referendum, or the demands of Randall Terry. The rule of law also requires a fundamental separation of powers?in which legislatures do not override final, binding court decisions solely because the outcome is not the one they like. The rule of law requires comity between state and federal courts?wherein each respects and upholds the jurisdiction and authority of the other. The rule of law requires that we look skeptically at legislation aimed at mucking around with just one life to the exclusion of any and all similarly situated individuals.
[. . .]
Members of Congress have apparently also had super-analytical powers conferred upon them, as well. senate Majority Leader, and heart surgeon, Bill Frist felt confident last week?after reviewing an hour of videotape?in offering a medical diagnosis of Schiavo’s condition, blithely second-guessing the court-appointed neurologists who evaluated her for days and weeks. His colleagues are similarly self-appointed neurological experts. Years of painstaking litigation, assessment, and evaluation by state courts are dismissed by Tom DeLay as the activist doings of a “little judge sitting in a state district court in Florida.” Only the most extraordinary levels of congressional hubris could allow a group of elected citizens to substitute their personal medical, legal, and ethical judgments for those of the doctors, judges, and guardians who have been intimately involved with this heartbreakingly sad case for years.
[. . .]
This is not a slippery-slope case, where it’s a short hop from “executing” those in persistent vegetative conditions to killing anyone with a disability. This is a case in which an established right-to-refuse-treatment claim, litigated for years up and down through the appeals courts, is being thwarted by parents with no custodial claim to their child. By stepping in merely to sow doubt as to whom Terri Schiavo’s proper custodian might be, rather than creating some new constitutional right to a “culture of life,” Congress has simply called the existing legal regime into doubt without establishing a new one. This new law offers no clarity about what the new federal claims might be. It just forum-shops for a more tractable judge.

There is no legal basis for the extra-constitutional grandstanding that marked the first abbreviated vacation of George Bush’s entire Presidency (that includes both wars, 9/11, intelligence reform, etc.). This was just an easy way to exploit a dying woman in order to score some cheap political points with the religious people who keep giving them money.